The Most Beautiful Parking Lot
The Most Beautiful Parking Lot Garden, or, The Art of Ironic Gardening
Preliminary Notes
Since the postwar era, public space has undergone major changes due to the rise of automobilism. The construction and expansion of transport infrastructure has been in constant flux and still seems to be a general trend in most European cities. The increasing affluence of consumers is met with the expectation of higher living standards, a sign of which is, among other things, the possession of more than one car per family. While in many regions and cities individual car transport is a necessity caused by the lack of working public transport network, in a number of social and geographic contexts, the ownership and subsequent use of cars is a sign of social status.
The town of Kyjov (population of 10 000) has not changed significantly since the early 1980s when the majority of new housing estates were constructed. Like other modernist housing projects in socialist Czechoslovakia, the housing estates of Kyjov were designed with generous green spaces which included park-like areas, garden allotments, public art, playgrounds – and parking lots. Walking distance to the town centre was 15 minutes. (The 15-minute city was – and still is – a reality in Kyjov.) As capitalism set in in the 1990s, so did a rampant development of automobilism. While during the 1980s owning a car in Czechoslovakia was not every family’s standard, at present it is common to own two cars per family. The increased demand for cars has also been reflected in the increased demands for parking lots.
The situation of automobilism in Kyjov reflects a change of values rather than change of the structure of the town; in the 1990s, only one new housing area in the suburbs was constructed, but the town centre can still be reached within a 20 – 25 minute walk. As the streets are not busy, cycling is also an option. Yet the ownership of cars has increased manifold. People prefer driving around the town where they or their parents would walk or cycle in the previous decades. The city council has not made any attempt to regulate cars in any way so far. With each reconstruction of streets or whole housing estate areas, the typical trend of the last two decades is the reduction of lawns, playgrounds, the felling of trees, or even the transformation of park spaces that are designated as such in the zoning plan into parking lots. As the prevalent voice of the residents is in favor of expanding the parking spaces, the populist political representation of the town invariably follows the trend of expanding the parking infrastructure at the expense of green infrastructure, so important for its ecosystem services, especially those of cooling down the town in the period of heatwaves and droughts.
My parking lot garden originated out of one such situation when a public park and playground was transformed into a parking lot in which greenery was almost completely sacrificed. When I moved to my present studio in 2012, I found myself surrounded almost totally by trees. The park was so calm that owls found it as their daytime gathering area. However, the larger part of the park went in 2013. The whole space was completely cleared, laid with lock block paving and only several birch trees were left at the fringes of the parking lot. (All of them died several years after the reconstruction.) The small remaining lawn area directly adjacent to my studio was planned to be transformed into a parking lot in 2016. In the meantime, I started squatting the places through a specific style of guerilla gardening and was hoping to attract attention of the residents to the space and start discussion about the necessity (or the lack of it) of paving away the complete area. In my gardening attempts, I decided to choose an approach of the semi-wild garden including an autochtonous flowering meadow – which in retrospect did not persuade many residents of the value of this particular green space. (Some of them were complaining of what they interpreted as persistent weeds or ruderals, while in fact I was growing ox-eye daisies, cornflowers, and many rare meadow plants.)
As the date of the start of construction was approaching, I decided to raise awareness of the planned transformation of the site among the residents. I printed out a large layout plan of the reconstruction, invited people from the neighborhood for cakes, music, beer, and chat in front of my studio/garden and executed a survey in which people were asked to fill in a questionnaire. Although I received about 50 questionnaires, most of which were against the planned reconstruction, the town council organized another meeting the following month (with FREE beer for the participants of the discussion). The mayor participated himself, and the loudest people in the meeting were those who were in favor of the parking lot expansion.
Excavators arrived in August and in late October 2016, the whole thing was finished. Although I was depressed by the whole situation and absolutely repelled by the space that came into being after the park, I still knew that I am not going to give up my gardening in this place. The same fall, I planted some creeping wines and a climbing rose next to one of the walls of my studio. Every following year, I was expanding little by little. After four years, in 2020, when I had bought about 50 varieties of bearded irises, I decided to expand even a bit further than the beds just adjacent or very close to my studio. I started digging at the fringes of the larger parking lot and have not finished yet.
The parking lot is surrounded by three walls between which and the parking lot proper there are narrow strips of earth which were perhaps meant to be the remnants of the original purpose of the area. The birch trees had been growing in some of these wider strips, while other ones were too narrow and only provided space to ruderal plants. In 2022, 2023, and 2024, I planted the widest strip with a diverse array of plants, mostly tulips, irises, aquilegias, annual larkspurs, and garden chrysanthemums. As I collected about 15 varieties bred by Jan Dvořák thanks to an art project Searching for the Faith of Šlapanice on which I was participating, I gradually harbored the idea of making the strip an outdoor exhibition of a wide array of garden chrysanthemum varieties. At present, about 45 varieties are on display; I have collected most of them in villages around Kyjov, asking people for cuttings. Most of these varieties are hardy as they persisted in their owner’s gardens for decades.
In fall 2022, I started planting rambler roses around the walls of the big parking lot which I hope to finish by the end of this year. The roses all repeat flowering and should be quite resistant to black spot. I am still enlarging the flower beds in one of the parking lot corners and planting them with perennials such as campanula lactiflora, acanthus molis, Japanese anemone, erigeron, Pacifica delphinium, oriental poppy, and different species of sages and stachys. I am envisioning the parking lot and the cars as being “drowned” in flowers all year round. The types of plants that I grow in the parking lot require continuous care. Unlike the taxons typical for public spaces which can withstand drought and pollution and substandard soil conditions, the plants that I choose are in some cases quite demanding. Especially chrysanthemums require nearly daily watering during the summer and they also require annual fertilizing by compost. The flower beds need regular weeding, roses must be deadheaded for repeated flowering, sometimes I need to use (organic) pesticides to eliminate aphids or fungal diseases. Dead leaves from the climbing wine need to be swept, dry stems need to be cut and taken away. Some chrysanthemum varieties need to be disbudded to yield larger flowers on the central stem. All these acts require regularity and are time-consuming. I spend about 2-6 hours a week working in this “garden”, depending on the season. However, I should add at least 1-2 more hours a week just looking at the plants every time I go to my studio. My relationship to the parking lot has changed profoundly. It is the plants and their flowers, each single individual that I come to visit or take care of which have with their powers made me accept the space, even love it in a specific way, and re-signify its meaning for me. I understand the place as something that was sacrificed in the fabric of urban green; my actions are attempts of remediation, reclamation, and hopefully also re-enchantment.
As I am gardening in the parking lot at least once a week (or more), I have become a common sighting for the neighborhood residents. They now stop me, have small talk with me (typically about plants), once one of the neighbors who had been initially quite inimical to my activities during the “rewilding” period of the garden, even brought me a cake as a form of thanks for the flowers. (I still kept one part of the parking lot as a “wild” area where I mow grass manually only once a year; in the summer, it is full of grasshoppers and praying mantises).
Gardening in a public open space requires some mental effort at the beginning. We are conditioned not to interfere with the space in ways that would change it. We are encouraged to be users, not producers. The only occasion when we can even just approach a semblance of contributing to the shaping of our shared public space is during public meetings during which projects of redevelopment of a particular space are discussed in public. However, these experiences can be very frustrating as in many cases, the discussions seem to be only a tolerated duty local authorities have to the public, but this duty does not materialize in outcomes that would not be already favored by the architectonic studio or the political representation. Thus it takes some initial amount of energy to persuade oneself to take the tools and the plants and venture into the space where confrontation is a possibility (“What are you doing here, are you authorized,…etc.”). Repetition is a key factor in this undertaking. You are taming the space through your gardening tasks, your regular presence in the space becomes a habit – not only for you, but for the people with whom you share the space. You become the inhabitant. Maybe you feel embarrassed in the initial stages of your gardening in this particular space and relax gradually as people get used to you; maybe you always feel the nervousness and/or other affective states in other spaces where you do guerilla gardening because you do not have the guts to perform your gardening tasks too frequently. Context is everything.
The temporal aspect is built in the form of my parking lot garden, too. My idea of the ideal state of the garden has been evolving over the years, I did not have any master plan at the beginning. I observe what works and what does not, I do alterations, I carry out everyday but small-scale maintenance – the type of practice typical for amateur gardening, but the opposite to technocratic maintenance organized by public authorities which is large-scale and intermittent. This garden is in constant flux.
In Czech and Slovak villages and even in small towns until recently, it was taken for granted for people to take care of a place in public space that was adjacent to their own house. This was not the case only with cottages or family houses but it was a wide-spread phenomenon in housing estates as well. Perhaps the scale of the housing estate and the overall design of the open space between the housing units mattered, but a front garden was a typical sighting in a smaller-scale estate with 3-4 storey housing units comprising 8 – 12 apartments. Another factor to be considered might be the fact that the first generation of housing estates inhabitants were people who came to towns and cities from villages; they took with them the habits and values that they knew from their previous social setting; as it was normal to have a decorative front garden in front of one’s cottage, people would take a little bit of their home to the housing estate. (In addition to that, it was expected by the authorities that all people would compulsorily take part in maintaining public space – special “volunteering” events were organized several times a year during which people would collect litter, mow lawn, plant trees, etc.)
These remnants from earlier times have become a rare phenomenon in some towns and cities but are surprisingly persistent in others (Uherské Hradiště in the Czech Republic, or Bratislava, Pezinok, Senica in Slovakia; front gardens of family houses covered with ornamental flowering plants (perennials and annuals) are still very common in Slovakia, unlike the lawn, pseudo-Japanese style rock garden, or a parking spaces prevalent in front gardens of family houses in the Czech Republic. Nevertheless, people are still interested in organizing the space in front of their house and in displaying both their own gardening skills and their horticultural taste; some municipalities organize so-called “greenery adoption schemes” which align a particular resident with a particular patch of public space that this person cultivates. (We write and say more about guerilla or grassroots gardening practices in Brno and other cities in Partisans With a Hoe.)
Hence I understand my gardening activities at the parking lot as a continuation of the similar practices that the generation of my parents, or rather grandparents, was engaged in. Sometimes, as a nod (or wink) to these traditions, I do the gardening wearing one of the Dederon aprons (Dederon was synthetic fabric manufactured in the DDR). Women would wear them in the 1960s – 1980s as a work “uniform” – be it at home, in the garden, or in the factory. However, while seeing someone tending to a flower bed in public space was a common sight several decades ago in my region, today it is seen as something odd, incomprehensible, and perhaps even slightly embarrassing. In accord with the neoliberal value set, the public has gradually embraced the idea that care of public space is the responsibility of authorities and companies that they either hire or establish. Working for the municipal maintenance company is not a prestigious job and the workers are mostly unskilled and badly paid. Performing the maintenance tasks in open public space might thus appear as something of a breach of (bourgeois) decorum.
The boundaries of one’s garden in public space need not be defined by a fence (or the horizon, as Derek Jarman noted in his Modern Nature diary) – they can be defined by other infrastructure (pavements, curbs), but perhaps most importantly, by the location under one’s window. They can be also defined by imagined (or perceived) social practices and values, and are materialized by the actual practice. They can be defined by the concrete spatial situation and disposition but also by the gardener’s courage, ambition, and determination.
While it is still imaginable or acceptable to cultivate space adjacent to one’s housing unit, venturing further is seen as a sign of eccentricity. It is in this respect that I consider my gardening activities in the parking lot as “queer,” if queerness can be understood in its broader scope as acting against norms, hierarchies, established modes of conduct and categories. At the same time, I have reached a conclusion recently that I may consider my parking lot garden as an artistic project expressing particular strategies of performativity and notions of counter-aesthetics responding to standards in landscape design and horticulture.
I work with several concepts in the parking lot garden. My approach could be characterized as non-design, absurdity, altruism/selfishness, and opposition. The altruistic /selfish impulse stems from two sources. Being selfish, I want to be surrounded by plant beauty against all odds. Thus it is primarily for myself that I grow plants with opulent flowers in the parking lot garden. I realized a while ago that to be rich for me is to have a year-long access to beautiful flowers which I can grow myself.
At the same time, I acknowledge the possibility of other people taking joy in passing through space which is now unique and pleasurable. One of the joys of gardening in this particular place is my awareness of the openness and accessibility to this type of “garden” to everyone – no fences, no gates, no locks. Everyone can come here, have a look, and pluck a flower, provided they do not damage the flower bed or take everything. I call this “low-threshold beauty” because of the accessibility to people from different social strata.
The concept of non-design and absurdity is framed by the fact that a horticultural professional or a landscape designer would very likely not put the most ornamental perennials and annuals in places where they cannot be seen from distance because the view is blocked by a wall from one side and a row of cars from the other. Unlike the pragmatic landscape design for public space which would probably work with some ornamental shrubs, my concept works with the greatest possible diversity of plants that are crammed in limited space. Looking at my flower beds, one cannot enjoy a vista or a composition from a distance. The plants have to be walked to; sometimes, they get in the way of the cars, as is the case of climbing roses whose thorny branches grow too fast and can catch against peoples’ clothes as they get in or out of their cars. Passers-by who are not attuned to the sight and do not know what they might expect to see even fail to notice the flower beds. On one occasion, I witnessed a festival march passing through the parking lot at the height of the chrysanthemum bloom. I watched carefully if anyone would look at the flower bed – no one did. Although I try to make my flower beds to be “loud” and hope that the ‘loudness” overcomes the relative invisibility of the beds determined by the spatial limitations, it is apparent that this type of loudness is not sufficient; perhaps if I grew triffids, it would be.
In a certain way, the parking lot garden can be seen as ´hortus conclusus´ thanks to the walls that surround it from three sides, or as the thematic ´garden room´ of the Victorian era. In fact, the parking lot is surrounded by three other ´real´gardens – all of them semi-public. Two of them are housing units backgreens and another one is a large garden belonging to a municipal nursery school. In theory, these gardens could be connected by small gates in the brick walls – each would be a garden room with a different character.
My parking lot garden can be also characterized as a display garden since I show my collection of chrysanthemum varieties to the public. Of course when thinking about the parking lot, I consider all these categories (the display garden, the garden room, the hortus conclusus) as a parody of the real thing. But I still include David Austin roses, I have been attempting to create an English style ornamental border, and am trying to imagine placing some garden furniture somewhere in the parking lot. Elaborate gardens with a wide spectrum of plant species, varieties, forms, and textures are typically reserved for people with privileged access. Housing estate greenery and parks are usually very austere and the greenery is policed there. I am bringing some middle-class aesthetics (in quotation marks, as I am ambivalent about its values), lushness, and rambunctiousness into this place that was tossed aside and relegated to the role of a junkyard.
I also like the concept of understanding the parking lot as a space whose single-use purpose can be partially re-signified not only by transforming it into a display garden as mentioned above, but also by making it a multiple-use space, if only very occasionally. In fall 2022, I invited close friends and some family members for a celebration of the chrysanthemums, loosely inspired by the Chinese Double Ninth Festival. We lit the flower beds with paper lanterns I made with my little nieces and I read poems by Tao-Yüan Ming, the 4th century Chinese poet who is associated with withdrawing from urban tumult and administerial duties and returning to the country to seek happiness in everyday things and contemplation of nature. Chrysanthemums (which Tao described plucking and contemplating by “the eastern fence”) are the signature plant of this poet. Sometimes I stand in the middle of the parking lot dreamily, look up at the sky to greet the geese, ducks, the bee-eaters or the occasional heron, then look in the direction of the mountains which can be glimpsed from a certain spot in the parking lot, and think of Tao’s verses:
I built my hut beside a traveled road
Yet hear no noise of passing carts and horses.
You would like to know how it is done?
With the mind detached, one’s place becomes remote.
Picking chrysanthemums by the eastern hedge
I catch sight of the distant southern hills:
The mountain air is lovely as the sun sets
And flocks of flying birds return together.
In these things is a fundamental truth I would like to tell, but lack the words
When I look at the chrysanthemums in a sunny afternoon and see the sun setting behind a concrete highrise, I can be easily transported by the beauty of these small events and sensations. I ignore or filter out the cars and focus on beautiful details. Sometimes I travel in my mind to my other gardens and fields outside the town, but on other occasions I imagine the future additions to this absurd non-garden that might eventually make it look like a real one.
